I have a question that has been puzzling me since last night. I had a raid device /dev/md0 configured with raid 1 ( two devices). I stopped the array (mdadm -S /dev/md0).. If you look at /proc/mdstat, the device is not active, nothing in there.

So, To assemble the array, I did:

Code:

mdadm -A /dev/md0 /dev/hda6 /dev/hda7

The raid device is now assembled and active.

The question is: how could linux have known about what the raid level is and other raid configuration given that I had no raid configuration file?

I was thinking that such data is stored on the disks somewhere! or something like that.

Could someone help figure this out?

bertl

10-31-2009 06:08 PM

This information is kept in a small block of meta information at the start of members of a raid set. Read about it in the good old software raid howto: